The Data Grail

The Data Grail

The Data Grail

Find à Explore à Publish online.

That’s the holy grail of data. Easy to find and consume, a pleasure to explore, and dead simple to publish on the web. We demoed the birth of that scenario at MIX 10 last week in Las Vegas by publishing this interactive visualization live during the session:

This took only a few minutes to create using “Dallas” and Tableau Public. Breaking it down:

Find data

Microsoft Codename “ Dallas” and OData are working on making data easy to find and consume. The vision is to be able to post and access any data set, including rich metadata, using a common format. Dallas took a big step toward this vision with its release of CTP2 at MIX.

Explore and visualize data

Data by itself is cold and uninspiring. Using Tableau and “Dallas” together means you can explore any data set simply by dragging and dropping fields to visualize it. This is a very powerful idea: anyone can easily explore and understand data without doing any programming.

Publish online

Once you’ve found a story in your data you want to share it. Using Tableau Public you can embed a live visualization in your blog, just like the one above.

The Data Grail is to focus on answering questions, not integrating to data and stumbling blindly towards answers. By using “Dallas” with Tableau you can easily find data and build stunning mash-ups and visualizations. Then you can publish them to the web in seconds to start a conversation.

“Dallas” creates a lot of opportunities for a company like Tableau. It makes it possible for bloggers, interested citizens and journalists to more easily find public data and tell important stories, creating a true information democracy. “Dallas” also makes it easier for Tableau’s corporate customers to find relevant data to mash up with their own company data, making Tableau’s corporate tools that much more compelling.